One of our big drives over the last eighteen months has been to develop and improve home-school links, and to support that we've tried hard to provide more suggestions, resources and guidance to support home learning. Below you will find a list of school-wide approaches that we use (along with links to all the relevant sites and portals), while further down the page you will find class-specific information, linked to current topics and learning:

• Children in Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 all have daily phonics sessions. We follow the ReadWriteInc scheme, and they have lots of guidance on how you can support your child with phonics at home here.  
• Nursery and Reception use Tapestry to share work that children have done in school and share ideas for learning beyond school. Again, speak to your child's teacher if you're not sure about how to log in. 
• Children in Years 2-6 bring home weekly spellings to learn - these are drawn from a combination of spelling patterns that children are working on in class and common exception words (which do not fit regular patterns) for their age group. Click here for guidance on useful strategies you can use to support your child in learning their spellings.  
• Keeping fit, happy and healthy is always important. There are links to lots of great resources and workouts to help everyone in the family get active at www.sportengland.org/get-moving
• Finally, one of the simplest and most powerful ways you can support your child's learning every day is by hearing them read and reading to them. Our guide on how to make the most of this is available here.   

Years 1 and 2

• Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice. 
• Share stories, pictures, postcards and mementos from seaside trips in the past. What things did you do at the seaside? Why did you go to that particular place? If you’ve been to the seaside in different countries, think about what is similar and different about all these places.
• We will be learning about the properties of materials and the reasons why different things are made from different materials, so try going on a materials hunt when you’re out and about - how many things can we spot that are made from plastic? Why do you think they chose to use that material? What other material could be used instead?
  
• Talk about the way the world around us changes with the seasons - what happens to plants, trees and animals as the weather gets colder? How do different animals handle the cold?    
• Practice reciting the days of the week and months of the year in order - saying them is great; learning to spell a few of them would be even better! 

Years 3 and 4

• Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
• Keep learning times tables facts - in Year 3, 2x, 10x, 5x and then 3x tables would be a great place to start. In Year 4, we're aiming to know all our facts by heart by the end of the year. 
• In history, we're learning about Ancient Britain. Archaeologists have found a surprising amount of relics from the Stone Age and Bronze Age in our local area, and you can find examples in Hitchin museum. Go to their website at www.northhertsmuseum.org to find out more about visiting. 
• Investigate what magnets stick to - fridge magnets work fine, and you can investigate lots of different materials around the house. Try different metals and help your child discover that magnets only stick to some of them (mostly iron and steel).
• There’s some great advice on talking to children about online safety on the NSPCC website at www.nspcc.org.uk/ keeping-children-safe/ We also use lots of resources from the UK Safer Internet Centre: saferinternet.org.uk/